Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Now that I'm livin' in Sacto, it's important that I keep my Yolo County connection workin' via Freeform KDVS in Davis. While most Californians don't even know Yolo is a county (the entire world of some Angelenos ends at Magic Mountain), most who know about it tend to think of it as three or four also-ran towns surrounded by fallow-fields and flood diversion channels. But in the gyms of NYC, apparently YOLO is a ladies sportswear label, because apparently they know what we know...YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE. After the three shows that sweep though the county this week, we'll feel like we died and gone to heaven three times!

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Keep both hands on the wheel this week. The 2nd half of this road gets has some bumpier stretches than we've seen in previous weeks. So much misanthropy and cynicism this week...You'd think I was in some kinda miserable mood! Well, it does suck when it's 100°F (that's 37°C for you canucks (can you imagine??)), but truly, it was a great week of CDR ephemera scores and record hauls.

And best of all, there's a new Anteenagers M.C. record. I said before that this band (along with Hank IV) make the best 4-minute songs in punk rock, but now it's been fully two records fulla future-classics clocking in under 3:00. This just means you get more ingenious riffs. I'm all for that!

Is it just my imagination, or do these young L.A./O.C. bands on Rich Bitch bringing exciting new jams with the style and taste of the collector-scum schooled on the Dangerhouse discography? Incredible! I gotta ask these young'uns if they've been boppin' to the Bags and Black Randy since birth.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

In the AFS news this week: This breezy, splendid new Dan Melchior album is thee superb all-purpose moodlifter of 2008 so far. Get it ASAP! Also, Eugene is back on the map for reals now. The band known as Spaghetti & Moose Balls is now called Hanging Corpses, and they appear with two other Eugene bands on the whacked-out Moon Boot Boutique vol 1 compilation. Damaged synthpunk and minimal-wave has swum up to the MacKenzie to spawn!

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Thanks again to everyone who donated to the KDVS fundraiser. $60,000+ is enough for us to continue being one of the handful of really excellent radio station on the air and on the internet. Everyone who paid already should start receiving their thank-you gifts beginning next week. Now I can get back to the business of doing what I like to do...that is blitzing you with taste-tests of all the gnarliest new vinyl, shitty spray-painted CDRs, and hopelessly obscurist cassettes! I've accumulated three weeks' worth to drop on you, so enjoy!

The two newest SS 7"es continue the label's reputation of infallibility and international purview. Los Llamarada described their hometown of Monterrey, Mexico, as a fertile ground only for bad ripoffs of Modest Mouse, so perhaps this XYX is just as miraculous. Rhythms are strong, supple, and very aggressive, and clever effects bolster the bass sound and add intrigue to the strident female vocals. This reminds me of the punkest, most panicked, and most sharply focused moments of the early-80s Brazilian all-female group As Mercenárias, but a little more ragtag and a lot noisier. And by "clever effects," don't think I mean that this is striving for supremacy of intellect; what I mean is...This band has achieved an excellent full-range sound. Hiroshima Rocks Around have been one of the finest noisy neg-vibe rockers from Italy for a few years now, and regular AFS listeners should remember hearing different cuts about a couple years ago from their HRA 666 LP, and about a year back, an even meaner set of unreleased tracks which were a little more straightforward rhythmically, but still mean and surly mutant blues with muscular low-end, slotting in somewhere between Feedtime and Billy Bao. I knew a shrewd label would swoop in on that new stuff. And there's still more where that came from!

A.H. Kraken spews from France with relentless gut-churning negativity, and all their many influences do coalesce pretty brilliantly on the choicest moments of this debut LP. You can hear a strand of this (e.g., Brainbombs) and a shred of that (Arab on Radar), but they're dissimilar enough from all of these bands to stake out their own unique niche. As AIDS Wolf have become more focused on songsmithing, they are surely in territory adjacent to A.H. Kraken. Both bands flirt with oblong rhythms and dual guitars weaving weird sideways riffs like a pair of charmed cobras, which is something other bands do, but while most such bands are happy merely to spazz out in this style, A.H. Kraken and AIDS Wolf are not content to be neo-no-wave gimmicky mimicries. They have become more focused on proper songsmithing. Where they diverge on the path to righteousness is that AIDS Wolf in the past year have begun to tickle the third eye psychedelically with their sound nearly as much as their graphic art, and A.H. Kraken are just inhumane punishers. I don't understand French, but the criminal profiler in me thinks this vocalist has a delightful dissociative disorder. I might have liked this record more as a 10" with the six or seven best songs because it hits a flat spot in the middle and plays a bit overlong. But as a band, it's a great idea, and as a record, this is a promising preview with some choice cuts that I'll surely revisit regularly.

A couple years ago, the Sacto/Davis supergroup was Switched on Vultures, but after a handful of shows and a recording session that produced this demo, their tenure was all too brief as one by one the members around ex-Sexy Prison singer John Pritchard moved or got doctor's notes saying that holding a guitar is too strenuous an activity. But that's okay because now John is fronting The Mayyors, whose second 7" is just around the corner, and Sexy Prison will be reconvening for a few weeks in July when bassist/programmer Robert Pickle flies in during a break from east coast grad studies. S.O.V. was very 90s-sounding, and not just because this demo was recorded by Tim Green.

I've loved all the Daily Void records so far, but after consuming their LP and string of 7"es, I was beginning to wonder if they could only play in a hurry. "Man/Machine" is the calculated plodding slow-burner that puts that to rest. It's all crawling pace, scrawlin' scratchy guitars, and dystopian bleakness, but before you think they've gone all Billy Bao on us, just know that they're still having fun on this record. Big ups to Florida's Dying for the best 7" packaging I've seen since the last S.I.D.S. record. The inner label of Side A fills in the voidspace of the blank window of the outer sleeve to complete a picture of a post-apocalyptic Pompeii that is home only to a few creepy bats.

Strong Columbus content remains a key element at AFS this week. The solo work of J.P. Herrmann has been a big hit here at Freeform KDVS for the last several months, and now we've just received the first CDR of Flu Faker which is J.P.'s family affair with (I can only assume) two siblings and a friend. And it's great, too! How is none of this stuff on vinyl yet? Flu Faker is mostly duskier, noisier, and aside from the one keyboard-driven song, not nearly as immediately catchy as his solo stuff, but it's some truly superb dark meat that you can really sink your teeth into. More sarcastic than oppressively bleak or agonizing, this splits the difference between Easter Monkeys and Cleaning the Mirror. And speaking of Pink Reason...Of course, I totally dig all the various sides and faces of Kevin's output., but this new 7" is surely the closest thing to a full live band sound so far. That might surely rein one some of the naysayers who want more immediacy from this band. So, if you're one of those slack-jawed punks who must pinch your nose to swallow the desperado 'Tussin-blues damage, then try this 7" straight for once. And from their most recent tour-edition CDR, Night of Pleasure prove that Times New Viking ain't the only band in town that likes talk basketball. Now, if only Coach Brown would mix up the play-calls to keep Boston from throwing three guys at Lebron, maybe we can see this overrated green giant come up short. 2-for-18 won't happen again regardless.

Leather Nun's "No Rule" is some powerful shit. It makes this do-gooder daydream about how fun a crime-spree would be. Listening to it gives me some kinda Highlander quickening reaction. I felt the same way when I first heard this new CPC Gangbangs album that finally came out. This segueway was in order. I should check the crime logs for the moments immediately following 10:40 last night.

About Me

As long as DIY bands and artists keep me amazed, I will keep doing radio and extreme-blogging as a tribute to them. In case you are an old classmate looking for me, yes, this is "Rick Ele" here.
If you have material available in any format, please send it to...
KDVS Radio, ATTN: Music Dept, 14 Lower Freeborn Hall, Davis, CA 95616, USA (Please don't send it to my personal ATTN; you can trust KDVS Music Directors to get the good stuff added to the largest and best music library of any radio station this side of the Mississippi! And there are dozens of other really excellent DJs here who will play the good stuff if you send it!)
...wanna get in touch about anything else? rickele(AT)gmail(DOT)com